§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

Andy Kessler’s Dec. 23 editorial-page commentary ” We Think, They Sweat ” is a prime example of the hubris that will cause great loss to the U.S. economy and loss of employment. He seems to believe that only in the U.S. can inventions be made and new products designed. He overlooks Toyota, Sony, Samsung, Tata and many other emerging technology, pharmaceutical/medical, and other companies in China, India, South Korea, Japan etc. When he says “they” only sweat while we “think,” he is looking at history. He fails to explain why, when “they” graduate five times more Ph.D.s in engineering and science every year than “we” do, we should expect to continue to dominate thinking and high-paying jobs.

As an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley with years of experience building companies and leading-edge products I can tell you our loss of position is already great and growing rapidly. When you start a company today, in order to secure funding you are expected to do your research and development overseas (frequently India or China, depending on what you are doing). If you propose to do the “thinking” for product design, development or manufacturing in the U.S., only rarely will you find investment capital.

Mr. Kessler (and the rest of us) must realize we are moving away from technology industries and related employment to an economic model based on services that need a person’s physical presence. We are fast losing our ability to compete where the work can move elsewhere. The “thinking” barriers of university education, experienced labor force, critical technology research centers, etc. that kept high-prestige, high-pay jobs here in the U.S. have fallen. Until we start “thinking” about shaping our future opportunities, given the new facts of life, we are the ones who will be “sweating.”

Student activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s have had a hugely destructive impact on American society, particularly in education. Standards of classroom behavior and academic performance have been degraded. Students were shunted away from the hard mathematical and scientific subjects and pushed toward social work and politics. They were instructed that communal living in the socialized political state was the only appropriate goal, and they were sent out from the classrooms eager to “change the world,” without any knowledge of the existing and historical world they were to change.

Multi-cultural education and politically-correct instruction have been remarkably successful in meeting those objectives. But at the price of several dumbed-down generations of students who are now ill-prepared to meet the onslaught of foreign scientific, economic, and military competition.

The full impact of this travesty will be felt increasingly as Bill Clinton’s student-activist generation retires, expecting to be provided full Social Security and Medicare benefits financed by the labor of only two full-time workers per retiree. And these workers will be less productive and less able to compete with their foreign counterparts than any Americans of the past, because of liberal-socialist corruption of public education.